One of the most frequent questions we hear from small business owners is “why did my domain authority go down?” This is a loaded question. If you are a business owner or an entrepreneur with a website, then your domain authority is critical to the success of your business and website. You’ve likely heard of Domain Authority (DA) scores before, and you probably know that it’s an essential factor in the SEO world. However, you might not be entirely sure about what it is and how it works. We’re going to talk about all the reasons your domain authority may have gone down, how to boost your scores and how to reduce spam scores.

Why is a High Number So Important?

While learning how to check website health, you’ve likely come across domain authority. Domain Authority was developed as a search engine ranking platform by Moz, an SEO/website analytical service. Moz provides search marketing, web-data visualizations, tracking, and other SEO-related insights. Initially started by Gillian Muessig and her son Rand Fishkin by way of a blog called “SEOMoz.” That was in Seattle, Washington, back in 2001, and today the service predicts how likely websites are to rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

How to Check Website Health

Learning how to check your website health is becoming more complex by the year. Moz uses more than 40 different factors to determine a DA score. Here are a few of the most important:

• MozRank – This metric is utilized for scoring your site’s external links, analyzing the number of links that point back to your website, and the overall quality of the links. Quality trumps quantity, which means that a single good external link is far better than two links that are of lower quality. MozRank utilizes a 0 to 10 scale (10 is the highest). The average MozRank website rating is a 3.
• MozTrust – MozTrust is also a metric based on a 0-10 rating to determine your external link quality. It is, however, a bit more specific as it measures how closely connected your site is to trusted websites (gov or edu sites). And when one of those sites links to another site that links to you, it’s a sign of trust that can help increase your MozTrust rating.
• Linking Root Domains – This represents how many unique backlinks your site has earned. For example, if your website obtains 20 external links from two separate websites, you’ve earned two linking root domains. Therefore, earning just a few links from different websites boosts your ranking more than if you have made numerous links from a single website.
• Search Engine Amiability – This refers to the proper use of SEO principles for your website’s overall structure and user-friendliness. Your site structure directly affects usability, and poor site structure can make your site hard to navigate. It can also make it challenging for search engines to effectively crawl and index your website, thereby hurting your rankings. This is essential when it comes to domain authority.
• Quality Content – Did you know that content quality is among the main factors determining your site’s search engine ranking and domain authority? So, although domain authority helps improve your website’s search engine ranking, they’re both closely correlated to high-quality content.
• Social Signals – Google utilizes social signals to identify quality content. For example, it assumes that content that’s commented on, liked, and/or shared hundreds of times has to be of good quality. Also, Moz uses those same social signals to determine DA scores.

What is a Good DA Score?

DA scores range from 1 to 100. Scores that are considered average range somewhere between 40 and 50. Scores between 50 and 60 are rated as good, and scores above 60 are rated as excellent. The higher your score is, the more likely you’ll see increased web traffic and SERP ranking performance.

(Image Credit: Digital Third Coast)

Some High Worldwide DA Scores

The web’s largest and most authoritative sites generate scores of more than 90. Some other top publications usually end up scoring above 70 to 80. Here are a few worldwide examples:

• The Guardian has a DA score of 83.
• BBC News has a DA score of 94.
• support.google.com has a DA score of 100
• youtube.com has a DA score of 100
• www.google.com has a DA score of 100
• linkedin.com has a DA score of 99
• www.blogger.com has a DA score of 100

Check On Your Competitors

It’s relatively futile, however, to compare your site to super-high-ranking websites.

Instead, you should be focusing on research to discover your direct competitors’ scores. If your competitors currently have DA scores in the 30s or 40s, that means your score of 52 is excellent. So, to determine whether you have a great DA score, simply compare yours to your competitors. If yours is higher, amazing, but if it happens to be lower, you have some work to do.

(Image Credit: Ahrefs)

Improve Your Score by Learning How to Check Website Health

You can boost your DA score by:

• Carrying out a website link audit of your site
• Gaining several quality backlinks
• Having unlinked mentions
• Improving your internal links
• Publishing linkable content
• Learn how to reduce spam score

How Often Your DA Score is Updated

According to Moz, their DA metrics are updated in real-time as those links are recognized and analyzed. Their link analysis (aka the Moz Mozscape Index) is updated every three or four weeks. That, of course, means that you should be checking your DA score every time you make any kind of update to your site. This is crucial as it will help you stay on top of your score.

What Domain Authority Tools Should You Use?

Learning how to check website health and domain authority is critical for any SMB owners. First of all, you’ll be able to find any website’s Domain Authority via the Keyword Explorer SERP Analysis section, the Moz Link Explorer, or their MozBar free SEO toolbar. Using any of them, you can keep tabs on your own DA score and those of your competitors.

What is a Spam Score?

Your spam score is a representation of the high or low percentage of other websites that contain similar features that are found to have been either banned or penalized by Google. This doesn’t necessarily mean that a site is actually “spammy.” It’s a comprehensive guide to identifying potentially spammy sites that warrant further investigation. You can use the DA PA Checker (Domain Authority Checker) on PrepostSEO to check this important area of your spam score. Just paste as many as 500 URLs into the checker’s input box, followed by clicking on the “Check Authority” button for concise results. The Diib Digital user dashboard offers tips on how to reduce spam score numbers. For instance:

(Image Credit: 2 Dogs Media)

How Spam Scores Work

The Moz Index (MI) is used to find and analyze spam flags’ subdomains. There are 17 distinct flags, and a number is added to that subdomain’s score when MI finds any of them. Your website will receive a grade of 0 to 17. A score of 0 indicates the most trustworthy site, and 17 means a place is the least reliable.

Diagnosing & Repairing Your Ranking Drop

So, if you’re still asking yourself “why did my domain authority go down?” Or “why did my ranking drop suddenly?” Just know, there are plenty of reasons for why this is happening; however, no matter what the reason or reasons, let’s face it, any rankings drop could end up costing you money. The key here is that the rankings fluctuate, so don’t panic. Before doing anything else, be sure to start by checking the following:

• Your domain may have expired,
• Your hosting might have expired,
• Your web host had an error and isn’t even displaying your site.

(Believe it or not, these things happen all the time!)

Here’s how to increase your domain authority:

• Make sure your site is functioning properly,
• Confirming the fact that your traffic is dropping,
• Checking for errors or warnings on the Google Search Console,
• Reviewing any recent changes,
• Checking for any recent Google updates,
• Identifying precisely what has fallen and when,
• Checking to see whether you’re being outranked,
• Checking your backlinks’ profile,
• Studying your on-page factors,
• Checking on your SEO activities.

Here’s how you can repair your score to recover from a DA score drop:

• By acquiring only high-quality backlinks that come from authority sites.
• By remembering that backlinks play a significant role in calculating DA.
• By improving your score via the creation of killer link-worthy content.
• By learning how to reduce spam score by removing any bad links.
• By optimizing the structure of your website to enhance the user experience.
• By improving your website’s internal links.

Website Changes That Affect Your DA Ranking

Several things are often changed in a website’s backend that could affect your DA score. Do any of these potential website changes sound familiar? If you’ve recently made any changes, they could be affecting your score, including:

• New plugins,
• Existing plugin updates,
• New website theme,
• Any new pages added,
• Significant URL structural changes (like moving your blog).

How to Check Website Health and SEO Strategy?

Your site’s SEO and website health are also significant factors when mapping out your online success plan. Knowing how to check website health and make an actionable plan can be overwhelming. Here are actionable steps to improve your SEO and website health:

• Using an on-page SEO checklist,
• Crawling your site,
• Conducting an SEO audit and defining your website architecture,
• Updating your meta descriptions, page titles, and URLs,
• Making sure your main keyword is included in your URL,
• Including your keywords throughout your pages,
• Tracking the topics and keywords for each page,
• Never engaging in keyword stuffing.

Diib® Digital: Increase Your DA Ranking Fast!

We hope we’ve answered your question “why did my domain authority go down?” Now that you have some basic info on DA rankings and methods for checking yours be sure not to panic if your score becomes stagnant or drops considerably. You can quickly get your website’s mojo back using some of the abovementioned methods. Diib® Digital is committed to helping websites, like yours, to improve their domain authority and overall web presence. Here are a few of the features of our user dashboard you’re sure to appreciate:

• Keyword, backlink, and indexing monitoring and tracking tools
• Blacklist monitoring and objectives for repair
• User experience and mobile speed optimization
• Bounce rate monitoring and repair
• Social media integration and performance
• Broken pages where you have backlinks (404 checker)
• Technical SEO monitoring

Click here for your free scan or simply call 800-303-3510 to speak to one of our growth experts.